Linden Lab Viewers

Second Life Viewer (a.k.a. the official Viewer, regular Viewer, official viewer etc.)

Official Alternate Viewers

When Linden Lab viewer projects are nearing release they will often initially release a Project Viewer, and subsequently a Release Candidate Viewer (marked as 'Release') as they are nearing formal release. Occasionally a Beta Viewer may also be released for a particular project.

Features and fixes that are still warm from the creative fires of development.

Old Releases

The Release Notes pages for many past versions contain links to the corresponding downloads. Note that some of these may be blocked from accessing the Second Life Grid because of their lack of support for new features.

Warning: Past Viewer versions might have known security issues, can be partially or fully incompatible to current server versions and obviously will be lacking newer features. Use them at your own risk.

Third Party Directory Viewers

Warning: The viewers listed here are not developed nor distributed by Linden Lab. Being listed here means only that the developers of the viewer have represented that they comply with the Policy on Third-Party Viewers and the Second Life Terms of Service. You are responsible for evaluating whether you want to use and share information with them.

Using third party viewers

You may connect to Second Life using software released by a third-party developer. Linden Lab provides a Policy on Third-Party Viewers to promote a positive and predictable experience for all Second Life Residents. Beware of third-party viewers that are not in the Viewer Directory: they have either declined to self-certify their compliance with Linden Lab policies or been refused for noncompliance with the policies.

Active Full Viewers

These viewers are projects that are updated regularly to track new developments in the Linden Lab viewer, and implement a full graphical environment.

The next generation viewer from The Phoenix Firestorm Project, Firestorm is based on the LL V3 LGPL code and offers extensive interface customizability including V1 skin options, feature and option rich with 24/7 support.

Catznip aims to refine and reinvent your window into Second Life. Our focus is stability, usability, privacy and plenty of new original home grown features. It's about taking a fresh look at things and attempting to do them better.

Subset Viewers

Light-weight feature rich non-graphical client, ideal for situations where full 3D rendering client is less than ideal option, for instance, an office environment, running on low performance computers and similar.

GroupTools is a lightweight viewer (Text only) that includes features to easier deal with SecondLife group activities such as sending notices and IM's. While GroupTools main focus is group activities, a few other features are available as well.

Out Of Date Viewers

These viewers have not been updated recently enough to be considered fully compatible with current Second Life services. Depending on your usage, they may or may not meet your needs.

The Dolphin Viewer is a viewer for virtual worlds, based on the official Linden Lab source code, that contains many fixes and enhancements for builders, explorers, sailors, and other vehicle enthusiasts.

Other Third Party Viewers

Important: The following viewers have either not applied for or have been denied listings in the Third Party Viewer Directory.

Whether or not a viewer developer chooses to self-certify by applying for listing in the directory, all viewers connecting to Second Life must comply with the Policy on Third-Party Viewers; listing in the directory is not a requirement.

Note to authors: If you make a viewer available make sure to include platform, version numbers and dates.

Graphical Viewers

Cool VL Viewer

Description

This viewer was created and is maintained by Henri Beauchamp (This viewer was formerly known as the "Cool SL Viewer" and its first public release was v1.18.4.3, released on 2007-11-16). It combines elements of several of the other viewers, as well as extra features, bug fixes and extra patches, all very carefully tested.

It puts emphasis on high UI coherency from one version to the other (meaning no bad surprise for "old timers") while staying in sync with Linden Lab's official viewer features, high stability and reliability, and a high reactivity to new patches and bug fixes provided by the Open Source community.

Reverses many of the unpopular interface changes, restoring separate friends and groups floaters and reinstating the packet loss and bandwidth indicators, the old toolbar and buttons layouts, the old/normal commands layout in the pie menus, the "All(old)" search tab, the old style (name-sortable) "Groups" search tab, the "Fly" button in the movement controls floater, and optionally reinstating the old, more visible, status bar icons and/or tracking dots in the mini-map, and the old chat history floater (without chat input line). Also fixes some UI regressions (missing buttons in some floaters, or visited landmarks tracking in inventory for example).

Implements the "RestrainedLove" API (formerly known as "RestrainedLife"), based on Marine Kelley's reference patch (switchable and disabled by default).

Allows to configure the date and time formats to match your locale or personal preferences (including with optional seconds for chat and IM timestamps).

Allows to wear/remove attachments and clothing items on double-click in inventory.

Allows to optionally prevent notifications to show and be logged in the main chat.

Allows to disable typing sounds.

MUD/MUSH/MUCK/MUX style "poses" (i.e. you can type ":" instead of "/me " to emote), and OOC double parenthesis auto-close (i.e. you can type: "((phone, BRB" and it will show as "((phone, BRB))").

Allows to hide the "Master volume" when not needed in the panel overlay.

Allows to build large prims (up to 256m in any or all dimensions) on OpenSim (not on SL, because of server-side limitations).

Improved friends list floater (with info about what your friends allow you to see: tehri online status and/or their position on the map).

Improved build tools floater (smaller increments in several parameters, extra "slice" parameter for some prims, transparency up to 100%, check box toggle for drag distance limit, adjustable number of decimals in Object tab for the position/size/rotation parameters, "Align" tool). Also allows to set the "invisible" texture from the texture picker (for invisi-prims).

Improved mini-map with panning, larger zooming range, specific symbol for avatars above 1024m (work around for a limitation of current server and viewer versions), etc...

Improved beacons: can filter beacons based on owner (you, others or anyone), can highlight attachments, can dissociate non-object sound sources, can keep beacons "always on" even when the beacons floater is closed.

Allows to export and import objects you own and created as XML files (for backup and restore purpose, or to transfer objects from one grid to another).

Allows to connect to all existing grids (and not only LL's) from the login screen.

Allows network bandwidth up to 10000Kbps.

Allows to save/compile scripts present in the inventory as Mono scripts.

Allows to teleport to double-clicked locations on screen.

Allows to sit anywhere "on the ground".

Allows to adjust the Z offset (height above the floor) for playing animations.

Allows to cache the inventory in the background after login (for faster inventory operations).

Allows to preview animations on your avatar prior to uploading them.

Implements a group titles floater.

Implements a radar floater.

Implements a teleports history floater.

Implements a "Worn" tab in the inventory floater, and a search/filter by item name, description or creator.

Implements "speed rezzing" on login and TPs.

Implements an object "area search" floater.

Implements spell-checking.

Implements a resizable text input floater (for para-RPers).

Implements the newest LSL functions, highlighting them properly (with tooltips) in the script editor and allowing to compile them. Also implements fully llTextBox() and the AGENT_AUTOPILOT flag with llGetAgentInfo().

Allows to ignore (and not only decline) friendship and calling card offers.

Allows to change how minimized floaters are stacked (top/bottom, bottom/top, left/right, right/left, fraction of the screen width to use for the stack).

Shows avatar keys in profile (in "My notes" tab).

Shows the avatar true height in the appearance floater.

Renders properly objects worn on the illegal attachment points defined in some hacked third parties viewers.

Provides Mesh rendering support !

Provides Mesh upload support !

Provides Mesh deformer (rigged mesh tailoring) support in OpenSim.

Provides full support for the new Alpha and Tattoo wearables !

Provides multi-layered clothes support !

Provides inventory item links support !

Provides multiple attachments per point support !

Provides display names support !

Full support for the Merchant Outbox !

Provides navmesh and pathfinding objects support and tools !

Provides full shared media (AKA "media on a prim") support !

Provides server-side baking support !

Provides materials support ! (not for the legacy v1.26.8 branch)

Provides ribbon particles support !

Provides fitted mesh support !

Provides GetMesh2 capability support (i.e. with the new llcorehttp-based mesh data fetching) !

Hippo OpenSim Viewer

Description

The Hippo OpenSim Viewer is a modified Second Life viewer, targeted at OpenSim users. It allows building up to a height of 10,000 meters, scaling prims up to 256 x 256 x 256 meters and other exciting features. More specific OpenSim features are under development.
The last developer blog commented: Releasing Hippo OpenSim Viewer Version 0.6.3. This release adds a Windows uninstaller and small changes to comply to the Linden Lab Policy on Third-Party Viewers.

Meerkat

Goals

To create a fully GPL viewer (no proprietary dependencies)

To encourage a community of developers that will submit patches for prompt integration

To have the freedom to make the sort of changes that Linden Lab has traditionally been unable to integrate (translation patches, refactoring, fixing intentionally crippled features, changes that touch many files)

To retain compatibility with Linden Lab's grid and protocols, present and future

To implement a loosely coupled cross-grid functionality that requires no central authentication authority.

Nicholaz Edition

Description

These are Windows viewer based on SL builds with a focus on stability, usability and performance (see Installation.txt for homebrew disclaimer). Mac and Linux variants are available through other open sourcers (links on the website).

Rainbow Viewer / Cool Viewer

Description

Based on the offical SecondLife sourcecode licensed under GPL2, this speedy Metaverse Client can connect you to a huge variety of exciting Virtual Worlds! It incorporates a lot of improved, new, up- and backported features and fixes that make the fast and rock stable RV/CV the client of choice for many users.

This viewer includes many patches and changes from a lot of different people and sources which I am very grateful to be able to use. Credits are given to everyone I know, in case I missed someone I sincerely apologize.

Rainbow / Cool are TPV compliant.

Thanks to Henri Beauchamp who laid the foundation for this viewer with his Cool SL Viewer. Special thanks to Winter Ventura for the Cool Viewer logo and Jacek Antonelli and Peter Stindberg for the Rainbow Viewer logo :). And to all the others who helped and supported me, especially the people involved and behind Imprudence!

Some incomprehensive list of features

A major improvement is an up-to-date OpenGL implementation that especially helps users plagued by ATI's Catalyst drivers but also leads to measurable improvements of overall graphics performance by 30...100% compared to the official viewer; depending on your system. Rainbow Viewer features the current user interface whereas Cool Viewer spots the leaner cleaner and more configurable legacy UI. It's all about choice :).

New 1.22.12.0 code baseline

CV's legacy User interface with a clean, simple and userfriendly layout or Rainbow Viewers current official UI, you choose!

TEKSTUFF Viewers

Description

The TEKSTUFF viewers are created to enable Youtube movies on TEKSTUFF media screens inside Second Life. The TEKSTUFF viewers are slight modifications of already available viewers like the regular SL 1.23.5 viewer and the Emerald 1634 viewer. Apart from that, the Emerald based viewer is fixed so it can be used in Opensim grids as well.

Text-Only Viewers

AjaxLife

Description
Browser based Second Life client, created by Katharine Berry. The only web-browser client which made it a lifeline for residents who could not use a full graphical viewer, or who could not download other text-only clients because of limitations such as corporate firewalls.

omvviewer-light

A Text client for the 3D Metaverse

Description
omvviewer-light is a text client for the 3D Metaverse including SecondLife, written from Scratch (but using the libomv library for protocol handling). It's GUI is created in Gtk# which is cross-platform making this the only current Text client that is still active and cross platform. Tested on Linux (32/64 bit) and Windows (not 64-bit windows).

Features
To many to list here in detail please see the project page below but in summary, Full inventory control, Full Chat/IM/Group IM's. Object search and interaction. Realtime local maps. Parcel displays. Read and Edit NoteCards and Scripts. View profiles. Friends Lists etc .....

Whisper (SlXSLChat)

A light-weight yet feature rich text-only Second Life client

Description
Whisper is a text-only Second Life client that comes in two parts. The client is written in Java (so it can run on many platforms). The client connects to a "transport", which is written in C# and uses LibOpenMetaVerse. The idea behind this architecture is that if you don't like the client, you can write your own and not have to worry about implementing the Second Life protocol yourself. The entire project is open source and published under the GPLv3 licence.

Features

Public chat

Instant messaging

Group chat

Search/join/leave groups

Search for avatars

Image retrieval

Profile retrieval

Notifications / popups as you would get in Second Life (e.g. group notices, balance changes, inventory offers)

SLeek

SLiteChat

A Lite IM/Chat Text-only Client for Second Life

Description
SLiteChat (pronounced "slight-chat") is a completely open source text-only IM/chat client for use with Second Life. Use it to talk to your friends without having to load up all of those heavy graphic goodies. Useful for those at work times.

Features

Communicate in-world with people on your friends list. Full adding/removing and search for Residents supported.

Group chat is supported (however at this writing you cannot leave a group or search for to join).

MetaPay for iPhone and iPod Touch

Send L$ with a simple to use and free iPhone App.

Description

MetaPay is a simple and fun way to send Linden Dollars from your iPhone and iPod touch for FREE! Out with friends and want to pay your part of the tab but have no cash? Use MetaPay to send L$ to your friends in Second Life® instead. Or use it to send L$ for any in-world use without firing up the full Second Life® client.